The bishop's careful provision, however, of good teaching at his
school and in his college bore good fruit at first, whatever may have
been the result later. If Corpus is especially the college of the
revival of learning, New College had prepared the way, and the first
Englishman to teach Greek in Oxford was the New College fellow,
William Grocyn, whom Erasmus called the "most upright and best of all
Britons." From the same college, about the same time, came the patron
of Erasmus, Archbishop Warham, of whose saintly simplicity and love
of learning he gives so attractive a picture. Warham was not
forgetful of his old college, and presented the beautiful "linen
fold" panelling which still adorns the hall.
At the time of the Reformation, New College was especially attached
to the old form of the faith, and it has been maintained that the
dangerous lowness of the wicket entrance in the Gate Tower was due to
the deliberate purpose of the governing body, who resolved that
everyone who entered the college, however Protestant his views,
should bow his head under the statue of the Blessed Virgin above. At
any rate, one New College man in the seventeenth century attributed
his perversion to "the lively memorials of Popery in statues and
pictures in the gates and in the chapel of New College.
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